Performance Coaching - Lessons Learned by an Olympic Gold Medalist and Performance Director

The Coaching Question

In this episode we are joined by Olympic Gold Medalist and Performance Director John Anderson to talk about performance coaching.

John Anderson MBE came to coaching with a background in high performance sport. Drawing on 20+ years experience working with world class athletes, John has developed a model of performance coaching designed to support the performer to get better at doing the things they need to do to get the results they want to achieve – more frequently and consistently.

He talks about team GB in the Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996 where the team finished in 36th position with just one gold and an overall total of just 15 medals. This was GB’s lowest ever numerical ranking. It was following this experience that John started coaching his athletes to think and act differently. His performance coaching model presents five performance parameters that he has drawn from Olympic and Paralympic sport, and in this episode we explore the importance of all five of these.

John particularly emphasises the significance of wellbeing, mindset and context to performance. He highlights how talent alone is not enough, and that one of the most crucial changes they made in team GB was to hire a lifestyle coach to support the athletes in managing their lives around their training in order to improve performance. This has interesting implications for organisations as they think about how to manage their talent, and the need to think beyond just knowledge, skills and abilities into context, culture, wellbeing and mindset.

We examine how this model can be applied in organisational settings, and we discuss how organisations will need to focus on getting out of survival mode due to covid-19 and back into high performance mode in order to succeed. John’s model offers both a framework and a set of coaching tools that can be hugely valuable to both individuals and teams as they start to focus on driving performance post the pandemic.

John has kindly given us permission to share the top level framework of his model. If you would like to to find out more or to become trained in how to use this model yourself/in your organisation, please do get in touch.

Resources:

• John Anderson: Performance Coaching Model - https://performanceleadershipcoaching.co.uk/performance-coaching

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